Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
Notes on the general intellect

During the 1960s and 1970s, operaist Marxists discussed a brief passage of the "Grundrisse", the so called "Fragment on Machines", in which Marx had described a virulent paradox of industrial capitalism that would possibly turn out to be its inner limitation: Capital, Marx writes, "presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth". Since in industrial production, wealth is mainly produced by machinery rather than by direct expenditure of labor power, Marx considers a tendential breakdown of a production based on exchange value, and the advent of a communism of disposable time.

In "Notes on the 'General Intellect'", Virno states, that this crisis has lead to a new stable regulation mode, in which intellectual labor has become a central pillar of production. Nevertheless, he discusses the emergence of a new political potentiality due to the fact that the general intellect does not primarily reside in the machinery but in the bodies of living subjects. Hence, a time of autonomy of general intellect would be about to begin which demands a non-economic critique of political economy.